Monument to Repression

Twenty years later, it still scars the mindgray and brooding, the
103-mile-long concrete barrier known universally as the Wall. Willy
Brandt was mayor of West Berlin when the East Germans sealed the border
virtually overnight. Last week, in its own schizophrenic way, the city
that incarnates all of the tragedy of Europe's brutal division between
East and West marked the latest anniversary of the monument to
repression.

In West Berlin three East German refugees held a hunger strike, and
protesters built a replica of the Wall to block the office of Aeroflot,
the Soviet airline. Only a few miles away, in the...